Mogao Buddhist Caves Face a New Threat: Tourists
The Mogao Caves in Gansu’s historic city of Dunhuang are a trove of Buddhist and Silk Road...
dunhuang
Sam Crane: Beauty and Power on China’s Silk Road
Sam Crane travels the Silk Road in a piece for Kyoto Journal: Today, Dunhuang is a major tourist destination, especially popular with Japanese, Koreans and Southeast Asians. It is a highlight of any contemporary Silk Road...
China: The Great Northwest
A motorcycle trek through the Chinese northwest was the inspiration for the following travelogue. The motorcyclist started in the earthquake ravaged Sichuan, and went on through other major sites such as Lanzhou, Jiayuguan,...
Buddha’s Caves
As part of his continuing series on China’s cultural legacy, New York Times art critic Holland Cotter reports from Dunhuang on the state of the Mogaoku Buddhist cave paintings: Mogaoku is in trouble. Thrown open to...
Growing Desert Closing in on Guansu Oasis Town – Lanzhou Morning Post
Worsening ecological degradation in China’s wild west, rom Lanzhou Morning Post (兰州晨报), translated by CDT: Xihu National Nature Preserve (西湖国家级自然保护区) sits in between Dunhuang (敦煌), Gansu’s oasis town, and China’s sixth largest desert, the Kum-tagh (库姆塔格). The 660,000-hectare region is the only green belt that shields lands to the east from marching sands coming out […]
Shifting Desert Puts Silk Road Art At Risk – Michael Sheridan
From The Sunday Times: The shifting sands of China’s deserts – already blamed for dust clouds adding to global pollution – now threaten to bury the world’s outstanding collection of ancient Buddhist art in caves along the fabled Silk Road. The frescoes and statues in the renowned Dunhuang caves are being damaged by grit blown […]
Mysterious Face of Mogao Caves Unveiled – CRI.com
From CRI.com via China Net: The mysterious face of 200 caves north of the Mogao Caves has been unveiled and will be made into a new tourist route, said Fan Jinshi, the dean of the Dunhuang Research Institute. Situated at a strategic point along the Silk Route at the crossroads of trade as well as […]
Jim Yardley: A Crescent of Water Is Slowly Sinking Into the Desert
From the New York Times: In this desert oasis where East once met West and that is home to one of the world’s greatest shrines to Buddhism, the water is disappearing. Crescent Lake has dropped more than 25 feet in the last three decades while the underground water table elsewhere in the area has fallen […]
New Dunhuang show disappoints and confuses
The Taipei Times has a review of The National Museum of History‘s (NMH) exhibition From the Forgotten Deserts: Centuries of Dazzling Dunhuang Art: Dunhuang is a name that resonates through the ages as one of the truly great treasure troves of art and culture… It would be nice to say that the exhibition, despite its […]
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